First Impressions: Space Engineers Early Access

Space engineers is Minecraft, but in space and not as good. That may be an unfair comparison to make, but even against alpha minecraft I’m not sure it holds up too well. The next major upgrade seems to be planets to explore, which will definitely necessitate another look, but for right now, I’m done with the game.

This is my space hovel. I’ve basically got a nice production setup going here, hidden behind a whole lot of unfinished walls. You’ll also note that the block size is waaaay larger than minecraft.

Right now the game has two problems for me. The first is that there’s no tier system/progression, which means you can create anything right out of the gate if you have the resources (which you have access to immediately as long as you can find them, which isn’t hard), but that means there’s nothing cool at the beginning you can’t build. The second is that automation is largely just pointlessly scaling up. Build a bigger ship so you can mine more resources so you can build more refineries and assemblers so you can build an even bigger ship to mine more resources with.